Arms Sales versus Human Rights: US approves sale of $290m in bombs to Saudi Arabia

Arms deals with Middle East dictatorships are being rushed through by Trump, critics say, despite opposition over human rights records.

The US state department has approved the sale of $290m in bombs to Saudi Arabia as part of a flurry of arms deals with Middle Eastern dictatorships in the last weeks of the Trump administration.

Critics of the sales say they are being rushed through despite broad congressional and public opposition to such military support because of the human rights records of the regimes involved and in the case of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the huge civilian death toll from the war in Yemen.

Read more at: US approves sale of $290m in bombs to Saudi Arabia | US news | The Guardian

Britain: suspends new arms sales to Saudi Arabia

UK government suspends new arms sales to Saudi Arabia after court ruling

Read more at: 

https://www.euronews.com/2019/06/20/uk-government-suspends-new-arms-sales-to-saudi-arabia-after-court-ruling

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Middle East: Saudi Arabia and U.S. on collision course as Mohammed bin Salman's standing ebbs

Trump has pledged that he won’t whitewash the murder and that the United States will do what’s necessary regarding whoever was involved, though he hasn’t mentioned Prince Mohammed’s name. The time to cash the check has come earlier than Trump expected. 

Saudi Arabia tried last week to lighten the load for the president by announcing the arrests of 21 suspects and the indictment of 15, while the attorney general said he would demand the death penalty for five, though he didn’t provide any names. 

Earlier King Salman fired Ahmed al-Asiri, the deputy intelligence chief, and Saud al-Qahtani, Mohammed’s senior adviser. In so doing the king set a ceiling on how high the punishment could go. But now it seems there will be no choice but to examine his own son’s future. 

According to The Washington Post, Prince Mohammed’s brother Khalid, the Saudi ambassador to Washington, was the one who phoned Khashoggi and encouraged him to go to the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul. The prince’s adviser and aide, intelligence man Maher Abdulaziz Mutrib, allegedly led the ring and after the murder phoned Qahtani and asked him to tell the boss that it was mission accomplished. 

Mutrib didn’t explicitly say the boss’ name but Qahtani has only one boss and that’s Prince Mohammed. The Saudi ambassador has strongly denied having any telephone conversation with Khashoggi, and a Post reporter has written that their last meeting came in 2017; afterward they corresponded several times. The top Saudi prosecutor said Thursday that Khashoggi was murdered by a “lethal injection” and that his body was dismembered, with his organs handed to someone outside the consulate for disposal.

Read moire: Saudi Arabia and U.S. on collision course as Mohammed bin Salman's standing ebbs - Middle East News - Haaretz.com